[Shannon, by the way, is currently on tour on the west coast -- she's doing a book launch at Lucky's on Aug. 24th in case you live in Vancouver!]

So here’s a breakdown of how much time we each spent working on the book.

Jim’s hours: 283.8 (writing: 23%, revisions and editing: 16%, publicity: 20%, publishing business: 38%)

Shannon’s hours:  1000+ (drawing)

So basically, Shannon put in 80% of the time even considering I took on publicity and publishing roles. (If I was just doing the writing, it would have been closer to a 90/10% split.)

We’re dividing the money we make 80/20%, but it still feels weird. I mean, I knew it took a long time to draw, but it really takes a long time to draw. This wonky division of labour is something to keep in mind when if you’re ever approaching someone to draw a comic. Even if you’re a slow writer and they’re a fast drawer, you’re still asking them to spend much more time realizing something than you spent creating it. What are you bringing to the project beyond amazing ideas and sparkling prose?

Lots of people are making their own games these days — point-and-click tools like Scratch and GameMaker are making it more accessible for non-programmers, and it’s easy to get your game out there via the internet. But wouldn’t it be even cooler to get you and your friends’ games out there on an old-school arcade cabinet?

The old cabinets are generally made to play one specific game, but you can re-fit it with a PC and a display and wire up the existing controls to make playing new games possible. Many people have been doing this to run emulators of the classic games – MAME cabinets can run hundreds of old games on a single cabinet. The Hand Eye Society, Toronto’s videogame culture collective, wanted to do a similar thing, but with locally made games. They debuted the Torontron, which plays six hand-crafted games by Toronto indies, at the last Canzine. Jph, who did the retrofitting, takes us through the steps he took.

Step One: The Cabinet – Retrofit or built from scratch?

First I began looking for an old cabinet that we could stuff all the gear into. In Oakville, Ontario we found The Original Pinball Exchange Club, offering various scrapped amusement vending machines for sale. I visited the shop and chatted with the proprietors. Walking through their stores of machines – and machine parts — I was amazed, and was fully inspired.

The hardware we got was old and unique — it originally played an Italian clone of Centipede. It worked for our purposes because it was not recognizable as any specific machine shape and the graphics printed on it were also generic enough that we would not need to change them. The down side of getting a machine that was built in 1982 is that it is almost 30 years old, and though the build quality was reasonably good, some parts of it where quite worn and broken. If I were to do this again I would consider just building the box myself since the reconstruction needed inside to make sure it held the display properly was extensive. However there is something nice about the nostalgic old machines as well. If you plan to use a retro cabinet be sure to measure your display and check that it will indeed fit in the box. This will greatly depend on the orientation of the display and where it will sit in the box.

I got a cabinet with simple controls — one joystick and buttons — but you can get cabinets with more elaborate or specialized control schemes. If you plan to use the original controls (as opposed to buying new controls) then make sure the games you plan to run on them just need those controls to play.

Step Two: The CPU – Find a computer someone’s throwing out.

I used a laptop that was being thrown away, but any old PC will do, as long as it will run the games you intend to play on your machine. Our machine is intended to travel so the ruggedized nature of a laptop was desirable. If you intend to keep your machine in the basement/garage for your own use then a standard desktop PC will work just fine.

Step Three: The Display – CRT or LCD?

Next we need a nice display. The tube-style CRTs are easy to find these days on garbage day as people upgrade to flatter LCDs , but you have to take care in mounting them within the cabinets — they’re heavy. (Seventeen inch screens are very common but look a bit small in a full sized cabinet.) I went with an even heavier option, an old 21″ Trinatron TV with an S-video in that I connected directly to the laptop. Although this would limit us to 1024×768 resolution, and it’s a bit blurry at that, it does provide a proper, large and bright image that is more authentically “arcade”. But the weight and fragility of the old TV has made moving it difficult when we don’t have a vehicle big enough for it to stand up in — setting it on its back has caused the TV to come loose in the past. So it’s a trade off.

Step Four: The Controls – Buy a kit or rewire the original controls?

Since I wanted to use the original controls that came with the cabinet, I got a USB controller, opened it up and then soldered the outputs of the original controls to the corresponding buttons on the USB controller. You could also consider purchasing all new controls since two new sticks and 20+ buttons runs around $40. Then you could replace the original controls and plug them directly into your CPU via a USB gamepad interface for another $40. $80 would have saved me many headaches indeed.

Step Five: The Mounting – Securing the display, CPU and speakers.

By reworking the old monitor mounts – the wood planks that held it at the right height and angle — and adding some new bracing to work with the oddly shaped and situated TV, the TV was mounted inside. Adding the TV monitor had the added benefit of making the whole box more solid. The TV speakers, which we removed from the TV, were mounted where the original single speaker was in the cabinet and wired in, giving us some nice stereo sound. If the display does not have sound, a pair of computer speakers could also do the job.

The old marquee light did not work and was replaced with a simple under counter florescent fixture and was wired in. The laptop fit in the coin box area, and everything was plugged into a single power bar mounted near the back of the box.

Step Six: The Interface – How to launch the games?

Windows XP was what we used as an operating system, but anything that runs on your hardware and the game(s) you want to play would work. I used GameMaker to build a menu that lets the player select and launch between the six games. The menu keeps running, and when a game is exited, goes back to the main menu so the player can select another game. We used six games in the Torontron and we had all the game creators make a version of their game that conformed to our control requirements, such as quitting when the red button on the coin box was pressed.

Step Seven: The Glory – Is there anything cooler?

As with any hardware/software proposition, there’s a lot of work and a lot of testing required to get it looking and acting like an arcade machine of olde. We had particular trouble with the controls which are inclined to be glitchy. But once you get it working right, it’ll inspire spontaneous high-fives and many exclamations of “awesome!”

~~~

Jph Wacheski and the Hand Eye Society are hard at work making five more arcade cabinets to be presented as an indie arcade at the TIFF Bell Lightbox for Nuit Blanche 2010 on October 2. Want to help out with the Arcadian Renaissance event? Drop them a line at info@handeyesociety.com.

Got any questions? Additions? Suggestions? Add them in the comments below.

Wheels is a smart and whimsical cyclist alternate reality written by Sarah A. Chrisman, who not only handmakes her books but also a selection of hats you can wear while reading them. Lovely!

Tongues is a baroque masterpiece. The worldbuilding is as dense and rich as China Miéville’s, and the cowboy sex smells of Jean Genet’s forbidden machismo. The fact that this outlaw confabulation has come from a debut novelist from Toronto and a Toronto publisher of excellent weird spec-fiction just makes me extra-excited.

We got a bit of coverage at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival — the guys from Vepo Studios interviewed me for their great piece on self-publishing comics and I rambled on with the guys with RGB Filter as well. (Sadly, Shannon hates being videotaped.)

More recently we drove to Detroit and did a launch at Leopold’s Books, a fantastic new bookstore with an emphasis on comic/zine/visual culture. Greg, the owner, interviewed us on stage. Probably the nicest thing was hearing that he was worried the comic was going to be another exploitive take on Detroit in the “ruin porn” genre but was pleasantly surprised to see it was not.

UPDATE: Quill & Quire gave it a starred review: “Munroe has created another stunning, thought-provoking work that will linger in the reader’s mind.” The Indypendent has an interesting contrasting review of three Detroit books, including ours. Also, Shannon’s touring the west coast in August! Drop her a line if you want her to come to your town.

Secondly — what with the urban farming theme and spring being here and all, we figured it’d be fun to make seed packets marketed for the post-Rapture world — ones that don’t need the light of God to grow. (The first twenty people to buy a copy of Sword of My Mouth at the Toronto launch get one.) So Scott made a nice design and Shannon went to take some pictures “in context” as it were at a garden centre. The photo and the altercation that followed with the manager follows below.

Manager: Do you have permission to take these?
Shannon: I sure do!
Manager: I don’t understand. Do you have permission to take these photos?
Shannon: Yes, I do.
Manager: From who?
Shannon: That guy who is in charge of everything. What’s his name again?
Manager: Can you please stop?
Shannon: Peter. That’s his name. Peter gave me permission.
Manager: If you don’t stop taking pictures, I will have to confiscate your camera.
Shannon: (laughing my head off) No, you will not.
Manager: Hmm, well…you have to stop. Please.
Shannon: Hang on, I need one more with the macro setting…

And the guerrilla photography is only this week’s promotional gambit — last week Shannon spent a ton of time redrawing people’s faces for their Facebook profiles in her signature style, in exchange for them linking to the launch or the book.

Over a hundred people have had their Faces Gerardified, but she’s still up for doing a few more (she’s doing the same thing for the Detroit launch) if you want to send a hi-res jpeg to shannon AT shannongerard DOT org.

UPDATE: Check out this neat interview with Shannon at Annalemma.

Comix nerds: It’s got an amazing array of international talent and all the local lights as well.
Book nerds: It’s at the newly renovated Toronto Reference Library, with new rooms and facilities to wonder at.
Game nerds: The Torontron will be there alongside the Hand Eye Society table.
No Media Kings nerds: Shannon and I will be there selling & signing Sword and chatting on panels
Cheap nerds: It’s free.

UPDATE: I am doing two panels on Saturday:

The Spirit of Indie: Where Comics Meet Video Games
Saturday, May 8th, 2:00 – 2:45pm, The Pilot

There’s more to the game industry than blockbuster, multi-system titles just as there’s more to comics than Batman. This panel
seeks to explore the ways in which independent comic artists and game developers have influenced each other and spurred each other on to explore the possibilities of their medium. Cartoonists/game contributors and creators Scott Campbell, Jamie McKelvie, Jim Munroe, and Miguel Sternberg will be interviewed by games journalist Matthew Kumar.

Tracers, Photoshoppers, Cut & Pasters: Cheaters or Revolutionaries
Saturday, May 8th, 3:30 – 4:15pm, Novella Room

Comic artistry has traditionally valued drawing things with nothing but a pen and raw illustrative talent. But people working from photoreferences, using digital tools and collaging techniques are producing some of the most innovative and beautiful work in the comic world. Does this diversify comic expression and represent an unshackling from the draftstable? Or is it just cheating? Four non-traditional comic artists discuss this and their approach to comic making. Featuring Shannon Gerard, Emily Horne, Sonja Ahlers, Ryan North, and moderator Jim Munroe.

11am Editing Your Own Work
Authors and editors share tips on how to spot the problems that are so easy to miss in your own work, how to add a bit more polish to your writing, and how to prepare your draft so that editing goes as smoothly as possible.

2pm Collaborations
Advantages (and disadvantages) of collaborating, especially in the digital world, with all the latest tools at our fingertips.

It was a push to get the book ready in time, and tricky to manage as it’s a IDW / NMK single edition co-publishing dealy, but Shannon still took the time to do these hilariously amazing bio illustrations of the two of us, check ‘em out after the jump!


I’d given Shannon a bunch of photos of me on a trip for a possible bio pic illustration, and the one she chose was of me facing off the digital zombies in some airport arcade. I went along with it even though I was a bit concerned it would make me look like an asshole if she drew herself quietly crocheting or something. Happily she drew herself as villainous as me. As usual with Shannon, things turned out awesome! Back to back, awaiting the critical onslaught…